Duluth at SemEval-2025 Task 7: TF-IDF with Optimized Vector Dimensions for Multilingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval

Shujauddin Syed, Ted Pedersen


Abstract
This paper presents our approach to the SemEval-2025 Task 7 on Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval. We implemented a TF-IDF-based retrieval system with experimentation on vector dimensions and tokenization strategies. Our best-performing configuration used word-level tokenization with a vocabulary size of 15,000 features, achieving an average success@10 score of 0.78 on the development set and 0.69 on the test set across ten languages. Our system showed stronger performance on higher resource languages with large performance gaps compared to the top-ranked system, which achieved 0.96 average success@10. Our findings suggest that though advanced neural architectures are increasingly dominant in multilingual retrieval tasks, properly optimized traditional methods like TF-IDF remain competitive baselines, especially in limited resource scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.98
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
712–717
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.98/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shujauddin Syed and Ted Pedersen. 2025. Duluth at SemEval-2025 Task 7: TF-IDF with Optimized Vector Dimensions for Multilingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 712–717, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Duluth at SemEval-2025 Task 7: TF-IDF with Optimized Vector Dimensions for Multilingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval (Syed & Pedersen, SemEval 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.98.pdf